Linking languages through a bilingual read-aloud project

Abstract

The present study was carried out in French immersion classrooms in an urban Quebec school board that is increasingly characterised by the heterogeneity of its Frenchdominant, English-dominant, and French/English bilingual student population. The study explored the extent to which a bilingual read-aloud project would (1) raise teachers' awareness of the bilingual resources of their students, (2) encourage students' crosslinguistic collaboration, and (3) promote teachers' cross-curricular and cross-linguistic collaboration. The participants were three English and three French teachers of three classes of six-to eight-year-old children. The French and English teachers of each class read aloud to their students from the same storybooks over four months, alternating the reading of one chapter in the French class and another in the English class. The data consist of (1) video recordings of the read-aloud sessions and discussion about the stories, (2) interviews and stimulated-recall sessions with the teachers, and (3) student focus-group interviews as well as a student questionnaire administered at the end of the project. Results are reported in terms of the enthusiasm of both students and teachers for the project, the opportunities it created for teachers and students to focus on both language and content, and the extent to which teachers collaborated to do so.Keywords: bilingual education; awareness-raising; collaboration; literacy practices; second language learning; cross-linguistic contrasts; immersion; reading aloud Introduction Over 40 years ago, an innovation in second language (L2) education began in the Englishmedium schools of St Lambert, a suburb of Montreal (see Lambert & Tucker, 1972). Anglophone children, a linguistic minority in the province of Quebec, had been receiving instruction in French, the majority language of the province, as a separate subject taught for a few hours a week. The new approach delivered a substantial portion of the academic school day through the medium of French, with the goal of improving the children's mastery of their L2. This subsequently triggered a rapid proliferation of such programmes across Canada, and immersion programmes have since been developed to teach a variety of languages in a wide range of contexts around the world (Johnson & Swain, 1997).This educational initiative became the prototypical model for immersion education. A key element of the model is a pedagogical approach that assumes homogeneous first language (L1) groups with similar L2 needs. However, as Swain and Lapkin (2005) have recently noted, (1) immersion students no longer necessarily share the same L1, and (2) the target language can no longer be accurately referred to as the L2 for many students, who increasingly represent culturally diverse and multilingual school populations. At the * Corresponding author. Email: roy.lyster@mcgill.ca There is a move towards dropping the prohibition against using students' L1 in the immersion classroom and instead developing practices more in line with findings ...

Using form-focused tasks to integrate language across the immersion curriculum

“…This observation led Lyster and Mori (2006) to propose the counterbalance hypothesis, which predicts that interlanguage restructuring is triggered by instructional interventions that orient learners in the direction opposite to that which their target language learning environment has accustomed them. Counterbalance, defined as "a power or influence that balances the effect of a contrary one" (Brown, 1993), is used in this sense to emphasize the complementarity of both form-oriented and meaning-oriented approaches to L2 teaching, as research has long suggested.…”

“…The first approach involves tasks that cross borders between content areas and is illustrated by a classroom intervention study employing form-focused instruction to target grammatical gender in French (Lyster, 2004). The second approach involves tasks that cross borders between language classes and is illustrated by a classroom intervention study implementing counterbalanced instruction to target derivational morphology in both French and English (Lyster et al, 2013).…”

“…A set of intervention studies conducted in French immersion classrooms ranging from 1st to 8th grade demonstrated the variable effects of form-focused instruction on a range of challenging target features in French: grammatical gender (Harley, 1998;Lyster, 2004), second-person pronouns (Lyster, 1994), conditional verb forms (Day & Shapson, 2001), functional distinctions between perfect and imperfect past tenses (Harley, 1989), verbs of motion (Wright, 1996), and derivational morphology (Lyster, Quiroga, & Ballinger, 2013). The instructional treatments in these intervention studies generally proved effective at improving target language accuracy, but especially so in cases where the activities differed from other activities more typical of content-based instruction.…”

Actes du Symposium international sur la litéracie à l’école = International Symposium for Educational Literacy (SILE/ISEL)

“…Dans le contexte qui nous intéresse, on peut dès lors penser que les différentes représentations qui circulent dans le cercle familial comme dans la société à propos de la L2 apprise et de l'utilité de sa maîtrise à l'écrit peuvent peser sur la représentation des élèves et sur leur degré d'engagement dans cet apprentissage. Nous considérons, en ce sens, que les élèves construisent un rapport à l'écriture intégrant deux dimensions (Dezutter, Cansigno et Silva, 2010) : d'une part, l'écriture en tant que mode général de communication et objet d'apprentissage scolaire, d'autre part, les particularités de l'écriture en L1 et dans la L2 qu'ils apprennent (Lyster, Collins et Ballinger (2009). À la suite de Reuter (1996), nous envisageons le développement de la compétence scripturale comme s'articulant autour de deux pôles interreliés : le pôle des représentations, investissements et valeurs d'un côté; le pôle des pratiques et performances qui associent savoirs et savoir-faire de l'autre.…”

Content-based language teaching: Convergent concerns across divergent contexts

“…"immersion" pupils)' (Baker, 1993, p. 15; for a similar description of Irish-medium education in Ireland, see Hickey, 2001). Even in some English-speaking school boards in the province of Quebec, where Canadian French immersion programs were first launched with homogenous groups of English-speaking children, increasingly heterogeneous classrooms consist of French-dominant, English-dominant, and French-English bilingual students (Lyster et al, 2009).…”